Being progressive used to mean being a dreamer.

You imagined a world better than the one you inherited, and that vision had color in it. It had music. It had dancing. It had joy. Emma Goldman, famously, wouldn’t join your revolution if she couldn’t dance. Somewhere along the line, the dancing stopped.

Instead, a kind of ambient despair settled in; not necessarily as a response to suffering, but as a precondition for moral legitimacy. This is what Jake Eaton, in the now-viral quote floating through progressive internet circles, captured so precisely: the way joy has to be filtered through the sieve of despair, the way any personal happiness has to be preceded by a verbal acknowledgment of structural violence.

It’s a subtle cultural shift, but it’s devastating.

The performative burden of politics has reached a fever pitch. It isn’t enough to be against injustice; you have to embody the correct emotional affect. You can’t simply say "I'm excited for this new job" without also saying "…in spite of late-stage capitalism." You can’t post your a birth announcement without prefacing it with "we know there is so much suffering in the world BUT…"

Some of this comes from a good place. A desire to remain conscious of privilege. A refusal to be blindly celebratory when others are suffering. But over time, this performative grief calcified into a social norm, one that punished expressions of hope or pleasure unless they were hedged with self-flagellation.

But what began as moral awareness metastasized into an aesthetic of despair.

In literary terms, this would be tragicomedy without the comedy. A Beckett play without the laughs. In political terms, it turned a movement that had used to be about liberation into one that increasingly felt like an unpaid internship at a trauma clinic.

When you attach social credibility to misery, people start performing it. Or at least, they stop hiding it. Being joyful becomes suspicious. Being too excited, too optimistic, too visibly free - that marks you as unserious.

In progressive online spaces, this has become a kind of Puritanism-by-proxy. Not sexual chastity, emotional chastity. A refusal to fully inhabit joy unless it’s been properly earned by passing through the furnace of social consciousness.

This doesn’t just affect social signaling. It corrodes the premise of a movement. If your political ideology is supposed to deliver a better world, but everyone who espouses it seems perpetually miserable, what kind of advertisement is that?

Enter Gen Z, raised on algorithmic dopamine and TikTok nihilism, who look at this ecosystem of moral performance and post-based-flaggelation and couldn’t be less interested. If the people with the right values are sad all the time, and the people with the wrong ones are having fun, who’s winning?

This isn’t entirely fair, but it's emotionally true. The culture war isn’t being fought on policy grounds anymore. It’s being fought on vibes. And the vibes are off.

You see this in meme culture, in creator communities, in the YouTube personalities who sit just right-of-center. They don’t need to win the moral argument. They just need to look like they’re enjoying themselves.

The right has its own problems. But crucially, it doesn't seem ashamed to offer its adherents some sense of personal liberation. Whether that comes in the form of aesthetic freedom (via irony-poisoned fashion) or economic hustle porn, the underlying pitch is: you could feel better than you do right now.

That’s an attractive proposition. Especially to a generation that came of age watching millennial progressives put themselves through a constant cycle of guilt, apology, and psychic exhaustion.

There’s a deeper wound here, and it’s philosophical. The left's historical power came from its vision as much as its critiques. Labor movements had songs. Civil rights marches had choirs. There was pain, but there was also rapture.

What we have now feels more like secular Calvinism. You are born into privilege. Your original sin is comfort. Your moral task is to remain hyper-aware of your complicity in systemic harm. There is no salvation, only penance.

That is a deeply unmotivating cosmology.

The thing about movements: they can’t just instruct. They have to inspire. They have to provide meaning. If all they provide instead is shame, fatigue, and social awkwardness, people will walk away. Or worse, they'll flip to the polarity that gives them an exit ramp into something less psychologically punishing.

Not necessarily because they believe it, but because they want to feel something else. Something lighter. Judge all you like. I call that human.

Part of what we’re witnessing is a cultural mutiny against emotional repression. The so-called "anti-woke" backlash isn't always ideological. Sometimes it's just aesthetic. A desire to laugh again. To speak plainly. To celebrate something without first issuing a 400-word trigger disclaimer and a list of sources.

It’s tempting to mock this as unserious. But seriousness is precisely the problem. If every utterance is scrutinized for its moral positioning, if every moment of joy requires a footnote, you end up with a politics that feels like homework.

People don’t join movements for homework. They join because it makes them feel alive.

Emma Goldman’s line about dancing wasn’t metaphorical. She meant it. Revolution, for her, was bodily. It was sensual. It was about freedom in the richest, most human sense of the word.

We've replaced that with something else entirely. A surveillance culture of moral performance. An ambient tension that makes every expression feel pre-emptively defensive. A slow leak of vitality.

If the left wants to re-enchant itself - and frankly, survive - it has to rediscover joy. Not as a guilty afterthought, but as a central offering. Joy as praxis. Celebration as rebellion.

The world is already heavy. People don’t need more reminders of how bad things are. They need a reason to believe that it could be different.

And that begins, perhaps, with remembering how to dance.